Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell calls for Alabama Republican Roy Moore to quit the the Senate race. McConnell also said Monday in Louisville that he believes the women who have alleged that Moore had relationships with teenagers.
Astrid Hacker/Louisville Courier Journal

On Nov. 8, things didn’t look good for the Republican Party and the leader of its Senate majority, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Elections in Virginia and elsewhere the day before showed a revolt against President Trump, and the party’s nominee for a special Senate election in Alabama was a twice-defrocked judge who was running mainly against McConnell and the Republican establishment.

On Nov. 9, things got more complicated. The Washington Post published sex-abuse allegations against former Judge Roy Moore, including a charge by a woman who was 14 at the time.

The Senate GOP campaign committee quickly broke ties with Moore, reflecting the wishes of McConnell, but he and most other Republican leaders stopped short of saying Moore should quit the race – only if the charges were true, they said.

Moore denied the charges, but more were made, and on Monday, Nov. 13, McConnell said, “I believe the women” – four simple words that accepted their truth and asserted Moore’s lack of credibility. McConnell said the next day, “He’s obviously not fit to be in the United States Senate, and we’ve looked at all the options to try to prevent that from happening.”

McConnell is known for a calculating, cold-eyed approach to politics, but he’s done right on such issues. In 2007, soon after GOP senators elected him leader, he led the effort to oust Republican Larry Craig, who had been caught in an undercover sex sting. In 1995, as chair of the Senate Ethics Committee, he led the investigation of sexual-harassment charges against powerful Republican Bob Packwood of Oregon, who resigned.

"He doesn’t make any political calculations on those type of things,” said one of his informal advisers, former chief of staff Josh Holmes.

But McConnell is surely calculating his next moves, which will come in a political environment unlike any in the past. He is dealing with a would-be senator who has aligned himself with anti-establishment Republicans who want a different Senate leader – and who have been enabled, if not encouraged, by a nominally Republican president elected on a platform of disruption.

McConnell hoped Moore would withdraw and back a write-in candidate – preferably Jeff Sessions, who gave up the seat to become attorney general – but that prospect probably evaporated Thursday, when the Alabama Republican Party stood by Moore, and President Trump stuck with the “if the charges are true” stance. Trump has his own sexual-abuse baggage (which McConnell refused to discuss with reporters), and doesn’t like to lose; he’s already lost once in Alabama, backing appointed incumbent Luther Strange over Moore in the primary.

McConnell’s next gambit was that Strange could resign, allowing Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to reschedule the election, but she rejected that idea. The last trick in the bag would be to get Democrat Doug Jones to change parties after the election, but as a Democrat who supports abortion rights, he seems unlikely to flip.

The latest Alabama poll shows Moore trailing Jones by 8 percentage points, but Moore could still win Dec. 12. Many Alabama Republicans who tell pollsters they're for Jones may not be motivated enough to go vote for a Democrat in a special election. Most Moore voters would brave an ice storm.

A Moore victory would disrupt the Senate and bring an ethics investigation of him, and perhaps expulsion, which faces legal obstacles. Some wonder if McConnell would rather have one less Republican than go through all that and risk further dividing the party. His prime directive as majority leader has been preservation of the majority, and loss of the seat would make the majority 51-49, making leadership even more difficult and boosting the small but growing prospects of a Democratic takeover in next fall’s elections.

In any event, McConnell can use Moore as a warning label, showing Republicans where they should not go. That may help quash some extreme candidacies in primaries, as McConnell did in 2014, but the prominence of Moore and his defenders, such as Trump ally Steve Bannon, bodes ill for the party next fall. Where McConnell and the establishment see a pedophile, insurgents see a hero or martyr.

“Republicans lose either way,” said GOP strategist Scott Jennings of Louisville. “If (Moore) wins, the president and party are saddled with a brand anvil who I predict will not support the president’s agenda as reliably as Strange has this year. If he loses, well, Bannon will have figured out how to elect a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in the reddest state in America.”

Al Cross, a former CJ political writer, is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and associate professor in the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media. His opinions are his own, not UK's.